Monday, December 19, 2011

Android 4.0 ADB Backup/Restore
I switch phones quite a bit and the cloud is immensely useful for that, almost all of my #Android apps restore and most of the data is up there, even my wifi settings and wallpaper get reinstalled. But games are still lagging behind on this, they rarely keep their settings in the cloud or give a backup/restore option.

I really didn't want to lose my 'World of Goo' progress so I've just used adb backup/restore to pull it off one ICS device and push it onto another. Worked a treat.

The command lines I used:
> adb backup -f worldofgoo.bak com.twodboy.worldofgoofull
and a little dialog appears on the phone screen to confirm the backup and offer the chance to enter a password to protect.

> adb restore worldofgoo.bak
and another little dialog appears to confirm the restore

et voila, done. Other options on adb backup allow for full user data backups (-all), just type adb to see all options.

adb backup [-f ] [-apk|-noapk] [-shared|-noshared] [-all] [-system|-nosystem] []
- write an archive of the device's data to .
If no -f option is supplied then the data is written
to "backup.ab" in the current directory.
(-apk|-noapk enable/disable backup of the .apks themselves
in the archive; the default is noapk.)
(-shared|-noshared enable/disable backup of the device's
shared storage / SD card contents; the default is noshared.)
(-all means to back up all installed applications)
(-system|-nosystem toggles whether -all automatically includes
system applications; the default is to include system apps)
( is the list of applications to be backed up. If
the -all or -shared flags are passed, then the package
list is optional. Applications explicitly given on the
command line will be included even if -nosystem would
ordinarily cause them to be omitted.)